Wednesday round-up

Posted Wed, January 11th, 2012 9:31 am by Conor McEvily

Yesterday was a busy one for Court watchers, as the Court issued opinions in four cases and heard oral arguments in two more.

In Smith v. Cain, the Court held that the failure of prosecutors in the New Orleans district attorney’s office to fulfill their constitutional duty (under the 1963 decision in Brady v. Maryland) to share with defense lawyers all of the evidence they had which might help the accused required the reversal of the petitioner’s murder conviction. In addition to Lyle’s coverage at this blog, the opinion drew coverage from Robert Barnes at the Washington Post, Adam Liptak at the New York Times, David Savage at the Los Angeles Times, Kent Scheidegger at Crime and Consequences, Debra Cassens Weiss at the ABA Journal, Joan Biskupic at USA Today, John Simerman at the New Orleans Times-Picayune (thanks to Howard Bashman for the link), and the Associated Press (via the Washington Post).

In CompuCredit v. Greenwood, the Court held that because the Credit Repair Organizations Act is silent on whether claims can proceed in an arbitrable forum, the Federal Arbitration Act requires the arbitration agreement to be enforced according to its terms. Providing coverage of the decision were Greg Stohr of Bloomberg Businessweek, James Vicini of Reuters, Jim Puzzanghera of the Los Angeles Times, Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal, and Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST.

Finally, in Gonzales v. Thaler, the Court found the petitioner’s appeal untimely, holding that Section 2253(c)(3) is a mandatory but nonjurisdictional rule; that the failure of a certificate of appealability to “indicate” a constitutional issue does not deprive a court of appeals of jurisdiction to adjudicate the appeal; and that, for a state prisoner who does not seek review in a state’s highest court, the judgment becomes “final” for purposes of Section 2244(d)(1)(A) upon “expiration of the time for seeking such review.” Coverage and commentary comes from the Associated Press, Hillary Stemple at JURIST, and Kent Scheidegger of Crime and Consequences. Additional details on the four opinions released today can be found in Kali’s post here.

The Court also heard oral arguments in two cases yesterday. (Transcripts of both arguments can be found here.)

The second case in which the Court heard oral argument yesterday was Knox v. Service Employees Int’l Union, Local 1000, in which Court will consider whether the First Amendment gives state employees the right to decline to pay union dues for political advocacy by the union. Mark Walsh of the “School Law” portion of the blog Education Week provides coverage. (Thanks to Howard Bashman for the link).

Monday’s arguments and opinions also continued to generate coverage. Steven D. Schwinn at Constitutional Law Prof Blog and Jeremy Leaming at ACSblog both discuss arguments in the Texas redistricting cases, and the Blog of Legal Times provides a PBS News Hour video in which Marcia Coyle analyzes some of the issues before the Court. The Court’s summary affirmance in Bluman v. Federal Election Commission upholding a ban on campaign contributions and independent political expenditures by foreign nationals also drew continuing coverage from Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy and Debra Cassens Weiss at the ABA Journal.

Several Court watchers also remarked on Monday’s denial of cert. in Cash v. Maxwell, which left intact a ruling that overturned murder convictions in two killings connected to the “skid row stabber,” allegedly responsible for the slaying of several homeless men in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Providing coverage are David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal, Michael Doyle at McClatchy Newspapers (via the Miami Herald), and the Associated Press (via the Washington Post).

At this blog, Lyle reports on yesterday’s filing by the states in the health care litigation; the states are seeking to overturn the mandatory state expansion of the Medicaid program. Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico also provides coverage. And at the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett posts a timetable for the proceedings in that litigation.

Larissa Lidsky at PrawfsBlawg discusses “the impression among media law scholars . . . that the Court in the last decade or so has not been taking ‘press’ cases at the same rate it did in . . . the early 1990s or before.”

Joe Palazzolo of the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog discusses a Yale Law student’s proposal to avoid potential delay in resolving the health care cases that may result from the Tax Anti-Injunction Act: having the federal administration sue a state that intends to resist enforcement of the health care law. Bob Loblaw of Tax Prof Blog also covers the proposal.

Andrew Longstreth of Reuters (via the Chicago Tribune) writes that last Term’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes has “lived up to the hype,” as it has already been cited by lower courts 260 times.

At The Hill, Ronald Goldfarb proposes a solution to the Court’s disputed recusal policy: the Court could “adopt[] a rule of its own, based on prevailing ethical standards, and assign[] the administration and governance of recusal motions to a panel . . . of federal judges.”

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.